176
PARTISAN REVIEW
The reason for this academic tropism toward "decadence" as a
category is most likely because, consciously or not, historians of culture
generally argue, as I have said, from the example of the body. And,
consciously or not, they believe in progress, however they may qualify
the idea by turning it, for instance, into a notion of cyclic rather than
linear advance.
In
this view imitation, the arrest of an art at some high
level, in making it spin around on itself, impedes the flow of progress
and stops things in their tracks.
An even greater and more obvious blow to progress, its apparent
reversal, is the advent of the crude and uncertain or of smaller creations
in artistic life. What so upsets most historians of later Roman painting,
to take one example, is the seeming loss of mastery in the depiction of
the human body. What displeases many critics of fiction today about
their contemporaries is the modest nature of their ambitions and their
achievements in relation
to
those of the giants of nineteenth-century
literature and music.
Yet if art becomes rougher or smaller this is only in comparison to
the finer or bigger, and only matters if one holds the latter qualities as
ideals. In that case one would not be judging works of art in themselves
but by reference to abstract measurements, which is of course how
works of art have generally been judged by professional judges. But
artists at any time may
choose
to be smaller or cruder than their
predecessors, out of a wish, it may be, for a release from the grand, the
confidently
finished.
Or else they may be like Paul Klee, who said that
at the beginning of his career he had wanted to create an art "as solid
and enduring as that of the museums" but had found himself in
actuality only able to proceed as a painter through the inspiration-the
examples of possibility-of things as tiny and transient as the forms of
sea life he once observed through the glass bottom of a boat in the Bay
of Naples. They may, that is, only be
able
to do lesser or cruder work as
the price-if it is one-of refusing to imitate. In any case the smaller or
cruder is not necessarily the inferior and, beyond that, there is no
logical or inevitable or inherent process by which the superior in art
yields to the inferior, health to sickness, or monumentality to deple–
tion.
In
his introduction to Huysmans'
A Rebours
Havelock Ellis wrote
that "there seems to be no more pronounced mark of the decadence of a
people and its literature than a servile and rigid subserviency to rule."
This condition may be unfortunate but it has nothing to do with
"decadence," if the word is to mean anything at all. With his wonder–
fully clear sense of how "decadence" has been corrupted as a word,
